“Meaning Haze’s lawyers,” says Harry.
I nod. Alex’s parents are comfortable. But in a drawn-out battle in court, Arthur Haze could buy and sell them a few million times over and not even feel the pinch. His attorneys could probably tie us up for years if we tried to go after the copyrighted draft of the story.
“What about this stuff on Abscam and Hoover?” says Harry. “What was the point? What do you think he was trying to tell you?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” I tried to go over it all with Harry in the car on our way in from the airport. Without any notes, I struggled to recall the exact words used by Graves. Now that he is dead and no longer available I’m forced to think more seriously about what he said.
I reach out and grab a legal pad from the table and try to make some notes while at least part of it is fresh in my mind.
“Politicians being people with big egos and appetites,” I say it out loud as I write so that Harry can follow along.
I make each one a bulleted point on the page with my pen. “Always testing the water to game the system.”
“Learning the lesson of going offshore.”
Little nuggets that probably lead nowhere.
“And finally, last but not least, the Hoover Effect. J. Edgar’s torrid card catalogue and how he used it.”
I look up at Harry. “Put it all together and what do you have?”
He shakes his head. “To me? It’s a lotta crap,” says Harry. “I don’t want to take anything away from the dead but the fact that most politicians have big egos ain’t gonna make it as a hot news flash anytime soon. Now if he found one that didn’t, that might be a story. Nor is the fact that they game the system. The offshore part maybe,” says Harry, “but only if we can get the specifics. Who’s got what and where.”
“Do me a favor. Check something over there on the computer for me.”
Harry goes to the desktop in the corner.
“Google up one of their language translators.”
He does it.
“German to English,” I tell him. Then I spell out the word, the one with fourteen letters that I can’t pronounce under the man’s name from the business card given to me by Graves. When I’m done I tell him: “That’s it.”
Harry punches the return key and waits.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“Foreign accounts,” says Harry.
It was late in the afternoon on the fourth day when Ana finally saw the man she thought might be Madriani. Her car was parked at the curb as Ana sat at one of the tables at an outdoor café watching the entrance to the parking lot behind the law office.
She wasn’t interested in the lawyers. What she wanted was more information about the people going through their trash. Who they were and whether they were connected with the man she had killed near the airport, the one who had her tripod and the satellite antenna.
She had been following the lawyer named Hinds for three days. She knew where he lived, an apartment on the other side of the bridge in San Diego, his name on the mailbox downstairs. She knew where he hung out, a small restaurant nearby where he had dinner each night and breakfast on two successive mornings. He always picked up a newspaper from a small cigar store on his way to work each morning. He had a dull routine and a life to match. No women. Lived alone. You could set your clock by him.
On the road she always stayed far enough behind him to allow anyone else who was tracking him to pull in front of her, but no one ever did. This made her nervous. The fact that the Dumpster divers disappeared into a military base meant that these people might well be looking down on both of them from an eye in the sky.
This morning she chose not to follow Hinds from his apartment into work and instead went directly to the office. He didn’t show up. She didn’t know why. Maybe he was sick.
She backtracked to his apartment, but his car was gone. Perhaps he was in court. If so there was nothing she could do but wait for him at the office. She sat at the table under the umbrella and watched the entrance to the alley behind the plaza that led to the parking lot. Hours went by and he never showed.
Ana kept an open paperback in front of her. Occasionally she stood to stretch her legs looking both ways up and down the street to see if anyone else was sitting in their car studying the alley entrance. Nothing.
She was about to pitch it in when, just before four, she saw Hinds’s car pull around the corner, pass by, its left blinker already flashing as it turned into the alley and disappeared. There was a man sitting in the passenger seat next to Hinds.
Ana grabbed her book, paid for her coffee, and made a dash down the street the other way. She circled around the front of the building, entered the small plaza, and down the path past the door to their law office.
She could hear them talking back by the parked car. Ana stopped. One of them was coming this way, a gravelly sound like something being dragged on the pavement.
“Paul, why don’t we lock your suitcase in the trunk? No need to take it into the office.”
“You’re right.”
The other man had to be Madriani, first name Paul. She heard him turn and go back, then the pop of the trunk as it opened.
“Did Graves have any idea that Serna was murdered?”
“No, but when I told him, he was all ears, pen at the ready. He wanted all the details.”
Ana made a note on the inside cover of the paperback in her hand, the name “Graves.”
“He wasn’t worried?”
“He didn’t seem to be.”
She heard the clatter of the suitcase as it was dropped into the trunk.
“But it got his journalist juices flowing.”
“Did you tell him about the girl? The explosion at the gas station?”
“Yeah.”
“And that didn’t bother him either?”
The trunk slammed closed. Ana didn’t hear the response, then: “Knowing what he knew you think he’d be worried.”
“Knowing what we know maybe we should be worried.”
What she heard was shoe leather on gravel coming this way. She turned and walked briskly in the other direction out toward the plaza. When she got there she turned just in time to get a look at Madriani.
He was tall, dark haired, a little gray around the ears, worry lines in the forehead and the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow. His suit coat slung over his shoulder and rumpled shirt made her think that he’d just gotten off a long flight. As soon as she got back to her hotel room she would run a news search for the name “Graves.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The Creeping Dragon nearly glowed with pride. His people had launched three small objects into orbit around the earth, antisatellite devices intended to blind and deafen America and its allies if and when the time came for war. The weapons had been hurled into space atop a Chinese launcher and were already conducting maneuvers as they circled the planet.
One of the weapons was equipped with a long extension arm capable of attacking American military and intelligence satellites and literally tearing them apart. It was part of the growing Chinese Star Wars program, a program that the current American administration pretended did not exist.
US satellites that had allowed America to dazzle the world with its military prowess through two Gulf wars were vulnerable to any adversary possessing the technology to destroy their eyes in the sky.
China not only had the ASAT (antisatellite) technology, but believed itself to be further advanced in this field than any other nation. More to the point, at a time when China was increasing its military and scientific research budgets, the United States was going in the opposite direction. America was reducing the size of their military to a level not seen since before the Great War, what the Americans called World War Two.
Cheng would meet up with Ying, his American asset, in little more than a week in Hong Kong, where the man came occasionally for quick trips to visit his money.
The bureau’s assessment had already
been delivered to the Chinese premier and to the standing committee of the Politburo. It was without question far more candid and certainly more realistic than the American president’s last State of the Union message.
China had identified the problems of a budding cancer in the US body politic forty years earlier, even as the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard were turning their own country toward chaos. Leaders in China and within the Chinese Army had reacted with an uprising of their own, deposing the “Gang of Four,” Mao’s wife and her cadre, who had given rise to ideological chaos.
A new generation of leaders pulled China back from the brink and set it on a rational course toward modernization. It was a program that required hard work, discipline, and a firm controlling hand by those in power.
Theirs, the new China, was not to be an open and unbridled democracy with its fits and starts and messy course alterations dictated by elections. Modern China would be a nation with vision and a program capable of taking the country and its people into the future.
Most of all, it would possess what America lacked—a well-designed, long-term strategic plan for the direction of the nation, but equally important, the sustained political will to carry it through.
The irony was that many in America thought of China as a socialist state. Yet it was America and its current crop of leaders who promised not only an open and free society but also a national government that was the planet’s ultimate nirvana. A place where if power was transferred to them, these politicians would guarantee a flawless social safety net for all.
The problem was they could not pay for it. They financed it by plundering the surplus trust funds of other programs that they had been bleeding for decades, and in more recent years by selling US Treasuries to Cheng’s own government.
The United States had been digging a deep hole for itself for at least three decades. American leaders sat by watching as vast sectors of their heavy industry hemorrhaged and ultimately fled offshore. Factories that didn’t leave closed down. Some politicians actually assisted these industries in their departure. Many Americans didn’t understand why. The politicians created cover for themselves claiming that this was all part of the “new world order.”
The next round of leaders seemed stunned when they woke up to realize that many of these corporations, multinational American giants, were no longer paying taxes on their overseas income. Wonder of wonders! To cap it off, these selfsame leaders couldn’t agree on a feasible method to encourage or force these companies to bring the money home. To the contrary they passed tax laws that actually discouraged this.
Cheng smiled. The bomb that was killing the United States was not hydrogen, atomic, or neutron. It was either stupidity or corrupt leadership, or both. And in Cheng’s view it was sucking the air out of America. China had become America’s banker for a simple reason. The United States needed ever-increasing infusions of cash.
Americans were told they could have it all. They were, after all, a rich nation!
Some US leaders invited the destitute of the world to cross their leaking borders with assurances that they would be entitled to the same. All that was required was political acquiescence to the politicians making the promises. They extolled America as the “great melting pot” and in the next breath engaged in dangerous games, pitting one group against another, then summed it all up by saying that “Americans needed to come together!” The nonsense made Cheng’s eyes water with laughter.
The reality was that in America the truly rich had regiments of lawyers and accountants with numberless schemes to avoid taxes. And when that wasn’t possible, they could hide their money offshore. There were members of Congress who knew that, because that’s where they hid theirs.
It was irony indeed that in the late 1980s as Beijing edged closer to reclaiming control over the island of Hong Kong and its adjoining territories, many wealthy Chinese abandoned the island, seeking refuge in the West. This despite the fact that Chinese leaders gave firm assurances that they would not interfere with the financial gold mine that comprised international trade in Hong Kong.
Recently there had been difficulties in Hong Kong, demands for democracy. But Cheng knew in the end that Beijing would win. The answer, as always, was patience.
Land prices in Hong Kong were higher than ever, the highest in the world, and business thrived. The reality was that those with power and wealth always thrived, no matter the nature of the political process. To Cheng it was ironic to watch the wealthy capitalists in Hong Kong side with the Communist government in Beijing. Both wanted the same thing, stability. Democracy was expendable. Money could still be made. China needed capital from the West to fuel its modernization on the mainland. Accordingly they did what was necessary to carry the nation forward.
Why slam the door closed in Hong Kong when you could filter the message of libertine freedom from the West and use the open door of commerce and China’s favorable wage rates to bleed your adversary dry? And besides, what better place to do business if your craft was espionage than your own island of economic avarice?
TWENTY-FIVE
One of Herman’s friends in Mexico supplied him with a local SIM card for his unlocked cell phone when he first arrived with Alex. The Telcel card allowed him to make local calls that could not be traced to Herman by name.
Each SIM card carried its own phone number. Throw the old one out and you could disappear and start over again with a new number. Mexico was now requiring some form of identification such as a passport to buy a SIM card, and to Herman, this was a sign. Every government on the globe was crawling up your behind to keep tabs on you like you were their puppet.
He used the local card each morning to check with DHL to see if any messages had come in under the name H. Diggs. This morning he was told there was one.
He trudged a few blocks before waving down a cab and did the drive, about four miles to Zihua and from there to the DHL office in an industrial area of town. He picked up the envelope at the counter and stepped to the side near the supplies as he opened it and read. The message caught him by surprise. He read it twice to make sure he understood what they were saying. Tory Graves, Alex’s boss, was dead.
Herman didn’t need the details to know that the man had been murdered. In the note, crafted by Harry, Hinds referred to it as “another accident.”
The lawyers had cut Alex off from the Internet when he headed south to Mexico with Herman. They made sure that he left behind all of his electronic paraphernalia. His cell phone, computer, and iPad were in storage, at least until he returned and things were safe. They didn’t want him leaving digital bread crumbs behind for the killers to follow.
Now with Graves dead, Madriani and Hinds worried that Alex might see it on the television in Mexico or read it from some other source and panic. They sent the short message south by DHL to Herman, an overnighter, to alert them and to tell them both to just sit tight and wait.
As far as Herman was concerned, the lawyers’ recommendations on something like this, where to stay and how to hide, were just that, recommendations. That’s why they paid him. Herman would be guided by his own senses, and at the moment they were setting off uncomfortable vibes exploding like sky rockets. Four people murdered in accidents three thousand miles apart in little more than thirty days. Whoever was after them wasn’t wasting any time.
Herman’s first instinct was not to tell Alex about Graves’s death. The last thing he needed was a kid in panic. Perhaps later. For the moment he decided just to pick Ives up and move, a new location, somewhere not too far, north or south, up or down the coast, simply telling Alex that this was all part of the original plan.
To Herman, the fact that they had murdered Graves meant that whoever was after them would now double down on their search for Alex. These were people with resources. They had proven that. It was possible that they already had a lead on the kid. Even if the chances of this were slim, the smart thing to do was to cut all the threads and force them to start looking all ove
r again. If nothing else, it would buy time.
Herman fingered the cell phone in his pocket, thinking to call his contacts in Mexico, some quick help to relocate, but then thought better of it. He could call from the condo.
He crumpled up the message in his hand, but he didn’t throw it out. Instead he stuffed the wrinkled ball of paper back in its envelope, tucked it under his tank top, and headed out. This time at a faster pace. He moved quickly along the street under the blazing morning sun looking for a taxi, anxious to get back as quickly as possible to the condo and Alex.
Becket is not an altogether uncommon name. Making it even more difficult is the fact that the girl, Ben, did not give me a first name, nor did she tell me if it was spelled with one t or two.
It’s even a longer shot because of the question of whether Mr. Becket actually lives in the area at all. He could have been a guest at the party, perhaps buying a table. From what Alex described, the gathering sounded a lot like a fund-raiser, the older upper caste in tuxedoes and evening gowns, catered food and drink, all under Chinese lanterns.
We have issued a subpoena for information from the navigation satellite company supplying the equipment in Alex’s car, but the company’s legal team is dragging their feet.
So I’ve had my secretary and another assistant working on trying to find Mr. Becket for the better part of a day, and so far they have come up with forty-seven exact matches for the surname Becket under one of its two spellings in San Diego County alone.
Using the information given to us by Alex as to the general location of the party we have narrowed it to three exact hits showing that name with Del Mar postal addresses. This is, of course, assuming that Ives paid enough attention to know where he was when he got out of his car that night. He said it was somewhere up near Del Mar.
I had my secretary run a data check on the three Del Mar hits. One of them was quickly dissolved, a woman, fifty-eight, living in a rental unit in the village. The other two both show unlisted telephone numbers with addresses on the bluffs above the town center. I know the area. These are large homes, some of them bordering on estates, with oversize yards and pools.
The Enemy Inside Page 17